Art imitates life, and life imitates art

I wanted to write something about the symbiotic relationship of life and art. Guess what? There's 1,250,000 writers who have already explored this, as per google. In-depth. Make that a 1,250,000 + 1. So what's left for me to do? Link to them, of course.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates life - Oscar Wilde
A little detour here, if I may. The words writer, tragic and destined all come to mind when you say Oscar Wilde. While many would argue that he was horribly wronged, I would say that he breathed and lived and died the life and death of a writer. Envy him, if you will, but do not belittle his life and his writing with your pity.

"We try to live as art teaches. We express love in the ways of characters in stories. We speak in unfamiliar situations in ways that we've read characters speaking. We select the clothes we wear based upon an ideal determined by art (such as fashion photography). We take on the roles of characters we see in art, and judge others by those same characters." - Richard Nokes, Unlocked WordHoard
One more detour. By that standard, the concept of what a writer should be, what you need to write about, how you live and what is good writing would be called life imitating art. So any art you create, based on your life, is basically life imitating art, not art imitating life. And here I was thinking that you need to pour your life onto paper. Well, scratch that. You can skip a stage and directly write from the life of writers from the past. Uhh...All right. I'll say it one more time. Slowly. With bullet points.

• 1. You read about other writers and their books.
• 2. Over time, from these readings, you form an outline of what a writer should be, how you live, what you do and what you write about. You begin to follow these guidelines, and you become a writer.
• 3. Your writing sounds suspiciously similar to the stuff you were reading in the first place.

Forgive me for the rather batty detour. Just seemed like something worth exploring. Not so sure now, when I see what I just typed out. Anyway, let's move on to something a little less abstract....

"Imagine a gun that uses fingerprint scanning to prevent you from firing a shot...It's not science fiction, it is science fact....Scientists have taken many cues from what they have seen on screen....Artists are generally very good at reflecting human nature in the tenor of their times and sometimes that leads to very valuable insights....If you're not constrained by knowledge of things you can't do or think you can't do, I think you can come up with some really nice insights." - The Age, AU

Which means life, as the artist sees it, is the building block for the artist's depiction of the future, which in turn is the inspiration for real-life scientists to turn that art into reality. The cycle started with artists imitating life, and keeps going on simply because scientists watch films. If they used their own imagination instead, the art gets a boot in the rump. There's no way to turn this one around and say that life imitates art.

Life does imitate art, to the extent that we take inspiration for our lifestyle from art. The Jennifer Anniston and David Beckham haircuts are testament to this fact. But artists, and writers in particular, sorely need a reality check, if they think that their writing, or art, is any form of inspiration for life, or other writers and artists. It's just art inspiring more art. There is no life in there anywhere.